Episode 23 is packed chock-full of awesome guests. We talk about the controversy around the cancellation of BritRuby, and the larger issues of diversity and inclusiveness at tech conferences, with Ashe Dryden and Reg Braithwaite. We also get into the goofiness of Star Trek and the wonder of railroad games.

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UPDATE: Because of an editing issue, they've republished Episode 23 with a corrected version.

In general the Symfony2 scene is quite un-diverse, at least when it comes to gender. I don't remember ever seeing a women present on a Symfony2 topic at a conference. I think the only one that I have heard speak on Symfony2 is Lorna. Alvaro mentioned that at deSymfony there was a presentation by a female speaker. That being said, skimming over the top 100 contributors I don't see a single female name.

[...] So why is that? How and where did we fail as a community? I mean I can see that we have not put a lot of emphasis on encouraging non white males (I assume despite being half iranian I also count as a white male???) to submit talks. I am not blaming anyone here for that omission, though I think it might be a good idea to change that.

He mentions some of the work that the Python community is doing to encourage this diversity and points out that most of the presenters at Symfony conferences tend to be top contributors and project leads, not just "a white male".

That being said, the topic of figuring out how to fix this in balance isn't a topic that I feel like I have much to add or that motivates me to spend the hours of my spare time I invest in coding.